I’ve been supporting classroom teachers in their integration of technology into their curriculum for about the past 8 years. In those 8 years, I’ve met a wide variety of teachers, some who are comfortable with technology; some who aren’t so comfortable. One thing that I can say with certainty about almost all the teachers I’ve had the opportunity to meet and support, it’s that they all love free resources.

Seems like these days, with all the talk of an economic downturn, shrinking school budgets and high expectations, there just aren’t too many things in this world that can brighten a teachers day like a free resource. It was the opportunity to brighten a teacher’s day and my love of the free resource that drove me to give Jing, a free screenshot and screencast sharing application, a test run the other day.

For those of you unfamiliar with screencasting, a quick peek at the official Wikipedia entry reveals, “a screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration.”

Here’s how my experience with Jing shook out:

My wife, Kimberly, had made several comments over the past month or so about this free screencast tool that one of the other Technology Specialists in her district, Scott Aten, had been using. Not one to ignore, or tune out my wife, each time I “heard her” talking about Jing, I would respond with something like, “neat” or “that sounds cool,” but I never really got excited enough to take a look at the application in my spare time. That is until this past Thursday.

A while back, I had worked to produce a couple different video simulations of the eLearning courses we had developed for e-Read Ohio at the University of Akron. The results of my efforts were two Adobe Captivate authored .swf files that gave end-users a virtual “walk-through” of an e-Read course. We created them to put on our website so that potential participants could get a feel for the type of online environment e-Read offers. Once I got them loaded onto the site, one of my colleagues noticed that some of the verbiage was out-of-date and asked me if I could update those. “No problem,” I told her, “should be a quick fix.” Famous last words that I would have to eat…

As I sat down to begin editing the source Captivate files, I ran into my first snag. See, Captivate is a PC only program, and I was working on my iMac. No problem, fire up Parallels and I should be in business…or so I thought. I realized that the only computer that I ever had Captivate on was a Macbook Pro from my office, a laptop which was no longer in my possession. Bummer. That’s when it came to me...JING!

I scrounged around in my files and was able to come up with the original storyboards and scripts for the simulations. From there, it was on to the Jing website to grab the free download for Mac OS X (Windows version available too). A simple install and I was up and running, ready to Jing this thing out…or not.

I ran into another snag as I was trying to record my screencast. For this project, I needed to take people on a guide tour of our courses. To accomplish this, I had a very succinct and effectively crafted script to accompany my screen movements. As I tinkered with Jing, I found it to be extremely difficult to try and coordinate my navigation of the course and produce an Oscar worthy performance in the voice-over category. It was just too much to try and click in the right spots while reading from a script. I tried a number of times and just couldn’t get a satisfactory take. That’s when I turned to some of Jing’s other features.

During my fiddling, I noticed that one of the options a Jing user has is to export the screencast as a .swf. I decided a better approach would be to record the screencast without audio, export the .swf from Jing, import the .swf into a new Adobe Flash document and then edit the audio piece together in the Flash timeline. To record the audio, I fell back on my old and trusted friend, GarageBand, which allowed me to export the audio files in a format that was Flash friendly (.mp3). By piecing the screencast and audio together in Flash, I was able to add frames and delete frames from the Jing where I needed to match my audio. The end result was actually a lot more time intensive than I thought it would be, but I was able to put Jing to good use and come up with a fairly decent video. You can view it here.

Overall, I think Jing is a great tool. Upon further investigation, I have come to find that the developers of Jing never intended it to be a fully functional screencasting software application along the lines of Adobe Captivate or Camtasia. In fact, the website explains, “Jing's minimal feature set keeps the focus on instant sharing.” For quick and dirty how-to type tutorials, Jing is an excellent FREE solution.

I would recommend Jing to teachers for creating quick demos of frequent tasks that students or parents might need to review from time to time. For instance, teacher might create a Jing that:

• Shows how to access your class delicious bookmarks
• Demonstrates how to log-in to your class wiki/blog
• Explains how to fill out a Google Docs form you have created

Here are some other pros/cons I’ve compiled from my experience with Jing.
Pros:

• **Free**
• Mac/PC
• Simple controls
• Select any window or part of a window for capture
• Tracks mouse movements
• Exports as a .swf

Cons:

• Screencasts limited to five minutes
• Narration has to be done on the fly
• .swf export does not include audio
• You must use Screencast.com to host your Jings

Photo Credit: Jing Mao Tower: vista interna do prédio by designative on Flickr.